Driving Down Drives

We've been tracking customer and industry interest to reduce the number of disk drives in enterprise environments starting with our earlier post, Drive Reduction. That entry detailed how Turner Broadcasting aimed to simplify their environment by shrinking the number of disk spindles.

A few weeks ago, Byte and Switch released a story about NetApp's focus on power savings...with disks mentioned as a key focus:

"We believe that if more focus is put on getting increased work out of fewer disks while enabling widespread use of higher-capacity and lower-power disks, NetApp can help customers dramatically reduce power consumption."
    -Chris Bennett, vice president, Core Systems, NetApp (Byte and Switch, 3/19/07)

At first, it seemed a bit ironic. How does a company that makes its bread and butter selling disks start promoting disk-reduction strategies? The green angle is one approach too irresistible for most vendors to ignore. We spotted this early on and dubbed the effort Greenvertising.

Now, Dave Hitz of NetApp has provided more clarity on the situation of a storage vendor aiming to sell less disk in this post: Does Helping Customers Use Less Disk Hurt NetApp's Business?

Dave's explanations are clear and grounded in strong business sense, so be sure to read them on your own. It is great to see company's allow their executives to openly share these types of thoughts and strategies.